One Clydesdale’s Journey

Yours!

Well, I’ve had a few too many things going on the last 2 weeks that I haven’t had a chance to blog about this until now.

But a couple of weeks ago I dumped my bike and took a serious header in the process.

The only thing that saved me from any kind of serious injury and allowed me to ride away from it was the fact that I had my helmet on.

And the whole was caused by a momentary lapse in concentration on what I was doing.

Shelly and I were out on a training ride and luckily more than halfway done with the ride when it happened. We were starting to get close to an intersection and I thought that Shelly was planning on either getting a lot closer or possibly even going to go through it when (for some reason that I still haven’t figured out) I looked away for a brief moment.

It was at the point that Shelly came to a stop directly in front of me, unclipped and was standing with her right leg on the ground. I know that much for certain because when I looked forward again I saw the bike and from the angle that I was going I only had two choices; swerve to the right and hit her leg or stay the course and run into her back tire.

I opted for the tire since I knew that if I ran into her leg I could do some serious damage to her leg.

What I didn’t think about was the whole spinning tire hitting stationary tire thing and what would happen to all the momentum. And yes, I was hard on the brakes as well, but that just meant the crash wouldn’t be as severe.

Well, we smacked tires and the sudden stop of my tire meant that my bike was now the only thing left to keep moving… but in more of an upward and arching type motion rather than forward.

I somehow came unclipped and landed right on the top of my head and then body slammed down on my back right side.

It hurt like hell, knocked the wind out of me, and banged me up quite a bit. But other than a bit of a shore neck, shoulder and hip; the only other major damage I had to myself was a scrapped up knee.

Remove that one element of the helmet though and things would have turned out a lot worse.

As for the bike; the aero bars had to be readjusted (but they were already needing to be tweaked anyway) and there is a small scrape on the down tube.

Oh yeah, and I needed to get my back tire trued. Of course I didn’t realize that I needed that to be done until the night before the race. My bad for not riding the bike before that and checking it out.

I guess that’s another lesson learned.

Later,
John W.
A Clydesdale in training